In some settings, dragons tend to guard hoards of treasure — typically by lying on top of it.

This trope is especially ingrained in Germanic Mythology — in fact it is hard to find a dragon in ancient Anglo-Saxon, German or Norse legends that doesn't guard gold. Curiously, there is no consensus as to why dragons do this. Justifications in-story for why a dragon sits on a hoard, including backstories of how hoard and dragon came together, vary considerably.

In some ways, hoard-guarding dragons are no different from other treasure guardians: They make sure it isn't too easy for the hero to get at a desired MacGuffin, and a heap of treasure in itself provides a convincing motivation for a hero to engage in an exciting monster-fight.

Dragons have a peculiarity, though, in that they are especially attached to gold: dragon-hoards almost always contain at least a substantial share of gold. Whatever the reasons, on average dragons show noticeably less interest in other treasures, like silver or even jewels.

People have also long noticed that dragons have no apparent use for treasure: they cannot spend, wear or process it. More often than not, they don't do anything beyond brood over or sleep on their treasure. Dragons, it was concluded, must be pathologically avaricious and stingy—kind of like a species of compulsive hoarders with a Money Fetish. In fact, up to the 17th century, dragons were considered the emblematic representation of Greed.

In more realistic settings where dragons don't exist, large reptiles may sometimes be encountered guarding treasures. Parody versions will involve dragons hoarding something other than treasure.

May involve a Treasure Room. This trope is to Pooled Funds as a waterbed is to a swimming pool (depending on the size and age of the dragon, it may be the other way around). See also Thieving Magpie, for another creature obsessed with hoarding shiny and/or precious things, and Lazy Dragon, for dragons that don't seem to do anything beyond sleep on their hoards.

Loki: Agent of Asgard: Old! Loki engineers the creation of one as part of a complicated plan (time travel and narrative causality were involved). After getting themself and young Odin into debt, they steal a hoard of gold from a shape-shifter, who places a truth-curse on the gold with his dying breath. The man who ends up with the gold has his inner greed brought out by the curse, and ends up sleeping on it until the curse physically turns him into a dragon. This is a reference to the Norse myth of Fafnir — see below.

Dragon from Shrek sleeps on-top of a mountain of treasure. She doesn't seem that bothered by the collection of treasure in the sequels, though.

The animated The Hobbit movie shows Smaug sleeping on his treasure as if it were a bed.

In The Flight of Dragons, dragons nest on top of gold because they find it comfortable to sleep on, and it won't catch fire.

Moana features a variation with Giant Enemy Crab Tamatoa. Instead of lying on his hoard, Tamatoa puts it on top of his shell to make himself (as his Villain Song puts it) "shiny". The treasure includes Maui's magic fishhook (not because it's shiny, but as retribution for Maui taking one of his legs), which is why he and Moana go down to his lair to retrieve it.

Films — Live-Action

The Jungle Book (1994): The treasure vault in the monkey's lost city is inhabited by a huge python which attacks anyone who tries to take from the treasure.

Reign of Fire: When the young Quinn first stumbles into where the dragon is hibernating, the walls are covered by pyrite... or possibly gold. We don't get long enough to look at it before all the burning and the death starts.

The mockumentary Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real claims that dragons are naturally attracted to shiny objects and may collect hoards of such items, more or less valuable, to allure potential mates.

In Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy (as first seen in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug), the dragon Smaug is sleeping inside his mountain of gold. Smaug is also able to detect that the invisible Bilbo is wearing "something golden" (the Ring), which suggests he can sense (maybe smell) gold.

In the Beast Fable"The Fox and the Dragon" by Phaedrus (c. 50 AD), a fox discovers a dragon guarding a gold hoard in an underground cavern. When the fox wonders why anyone would waste his life in this way, the dragon admits there is no point to his behaviour other than that it is what Jupiter and the Fates have assigned to him. The moral then draws an explicit parallel between human avarice and miserliness and the pointless gold-hoarding of the dragon.

Saga of the Jomsvikings speculates that a sea-serpent seen at the Norwegian coast is the ghost of the Jomsviking captain Bui, guarding two chests of gold he took with him to his watery grave.

The voyagers get sight of a hill shining like gold in the distance. In the night, a watchman goes to explore the hill and discovers it is entirely covered by sleeping serpents. He sees a gold ring between the serpents (hinting that there may be more treasure underneath the snakes) and fishes it out with his spear. This wakes up a small snake which then wakes up all the other serpents and finally the largest, a flying dragon called Jakulus. Jakulus pursues the watchman and destroys two of Yngvar's ships before returning to his lair.

Reaching the source of the great river, the voyagers discover a huge dragon "and much gold lying under it." When the dragon crawls to the river to drink, the voyagers loot the gold, which is "as hot as if it had just been melted in a forge". Shortly after, the voyagers meet a demon who explains the spot where the dragon guards the hoard was the tomb of a very rich king named Siggeus, who also had three daughters who were so greedy two of them killed themselves just because they were jealous of their sisters' wealth. Later, "dragons ate the king’s cadaver and the bodies of his daughters" but also "some believe they’ve turned into dragons."

In the chapter "The King's Ankus" from Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, a maharajah's forgotten treasure vault in a lost city is guarded by an unusually large and abnormally old cobra. It is later revealed that his venom has dried up from old age. When Mowgli discovers that men will kill for the treasure, he tells the cobra to train a replacement.

Smaug of The Hobbit destroyed the Kingdoms of Lonely Mountain and Dale to rob the kings' treasures. He heaped them up in a vault where he spends most of his time just sleeping on it. This habit also has the advantage that the coins and gems grow into his sticky, glowing hot skin, thus providing him with additional armor. Despite the hoard's fantastical size, after guarding it for decades Smaug knows it so well that he immediately detects the loss of a single cup that Bilbo stole while Smaug was asleep.

In The Lord of the Rings, Éowyn mentions that her ancestor Fram killed "Scatha the Worm" and thus won a hoard which the dragon had robbed from dwarves.

Farmer Giles of Ham has the dragon Chrysophylax Dives ("Gold-watcher the Rich"), whose cave contains fantastical riches of all sorts. How the got all that stuff is never explained, nor does anyone ever ask.

In "The Hoard", a ballad from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, a dragon kills a dwarf to appropriate the latter's hoard. Later the dragon faces the same treatment through a human warrior.

In The Pilgrim's Regress, "the Northern dragon is so greedy that his anxiety for his gold hardly lets him sleep".

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace stumbles upon a dragon's hoard while the dragon is absent. He gets greedy, falls asleep on top of it, and is transformed into a dragon himself.

In the Earthsea series, the dragons are obsessed with hoarding jewelry... at least at first.

In Barbara Hambly's Dragonsbane series, dragons love gold because dragon magic resonates with it to produce a narcotic-like effect that dragons easily become addicted to. Some dragons manage to break this addiction, however.

Dragonology explains that dragons hoard treasure to use as armor for their soft underbelly. It also states that certain species are capable of learning to concept of value and add collector's items like rare books to their hoard out of avarice.

In Guards! Guards!, the dragon that takes over the palace of Ankh-Morpork demands all the gold for its hoard. Since Ankh-Morpork is a Vestigial Empire of gilded treasures and heavily diluted coinage, there's a lot of ugliness before the dragon is satisfied. Well, somewhat satisfied: "A three-legged lizard wouldn't hoard this lot!"

In the J.W. Wells & Co. series, dragons often appear in the vaults of banks, which is why companies like J.W. Wells find it useful and lucrative to keep a "pest control specialist" in their employ.

In the Myth Adventures novels, Gleep explains that dragons hoard gold because it's so soft and corrosion-proof that it's ideal for baby dragons to teethe on. Dragons with offspring collect it for their young, and grown-up dragons keep it as a sentimental reminder of childhood.

In Heir Apparent, the protagonist needs to sneak into a dragon's lair to steal its treasure.

In The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, the dragon Gyld is old and tired and mostly content to live in Sybel's menagerie, but occasionally longs for his old hoard, which ends up causing some trouble.

John Gardner's Grendel features a dragon who hoards gold, and advises Grendel that the only point of life is to "find a pile of gold and sit on it."

A quest for a fabled Dragon Hoard (inspired by the Golden Fleece, and likewise a case of the dragon being hired to guard a royal treasure) provides the main plot in The Dragon Hoard by Tanith Lee. The trope is also parodied in a story-within-the-story that includes a dragon who can't hoard gold because he's allergic to it.

Parodied in Grunts! by Mary Gentle: A troop of Orcs is ordered to steal powerful artifacts from a dragon hoard. It turns out the dragon was not interested in treasure, but a collector of weapons and militaria.

Justified: As mentioned by Hagrid in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the goblins who run Gringotts bank use trained dragons to guard the high-security vaults. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry, Ron and Hermione have to get past a guard dragon when breaking into the LeStrange vault to steal one of Voldemort's horcruxes, the golden Cup of Helga Hufflepuff. The dragons are non-sapient and presumably do not care about gold themselves.

The second task in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire involved the champions having to get a golden egg from a dragon. Again, the dragons didn't actually care about the gold — each golden egg was in a clutch of real ones.

In Seraphina Dragons hoarded treasure until the treaty and Ardmagar Comonot reforms. Interestingly, the new generation of dragons still hoard in a way, collecting books and sitting on them.

In Everworld, the only thing dragons seem to care about is money; Merlin has a few who works for him, and at least one argues about fees during their mission. The series' best example is Nidhoggr, who, aside from being huge even by dragon standards, has a hoard to match. Yet when the protagonists meet him, he's miserable/furious that some of it (namely, four magical items previously belonging to the Celtic gods) were stolen by leprechauns.

It was insane, of course. This dragon, this brachiosaurus of a creature, was sitting in and on enough wealth to buy France. And yet, the monstrous thing was crying, weeping swimming pools of tears.

The heroes are allowed to leave his cave in exchange for getting the treasure back. To ensure their loyalty, Niddhoggr replaces their hearts with rubies... except Senna, who would need a diamond, and he wasn't about to pay that much.

The Dragon's Ring series portrays dragons as having a psychological addiction to gold, as their hoards are not only a preeminent status symbol but magically revitalize their powers when in physical contact. The novels show that this can be taken advantage of when fighting them, such as offering them a cursed gold coin which they will be unable to resist.

In the first book of Young Wizards, Nita and Kit visit with a very old fireworm, also called a dragon. It was protecting its own collection of jewels, gold, and trash, but was extremely anxious as it was losing its memory and couldn't be sure if it lost anything. It was therefore extremely suspicious at seeing anyone, fearing they would steal from it.

In the speculative zoology book The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson, dragons are essentially a mess of volatile chemistry, with the fire-breathing being a side-effect of producing hydrogen so they can fly. Their nests are made of gold because gold is unlikely to react to any of the gasses they produce.

In the InCryptid series, gold is somehow necessary for maintaining draconic health. The cryptozoologists aren't sure why, and generations of hunters killing the dragons to steal the gold and remove the threat of bus-sized creatures that breathe fire from their neighborhoods until they were nearly extinct didn't help.

The Sleeping Beauty: One of the Engagement Challenge tests is for the princes to find some way of sneaking a mildly-cursed item into a dragon's hoard without harming the dragon. The dragon agreed to this because 1) all the items are gold, 2) he's immune to all the curses, and 3) a reputation for having a cursed hoard should cut down on treasure hunters bothering him.

In the Temeraire series, dragons have an intrinsic love of all that is shiny and are easily bribed by it. When the protagonists are traveling through central Asia with a pack of feral dragons, the ferals exchange stories about a group of dragons fighting and arguing over a horde of treasure. The Chinese dragons love gold, but they'd rather have it tucked in a safe bank account. The Russian heavyweight dragons steal anything they can find and horde it, and threaten to kill anyone that so much as approaches their horde.

A dragon's former hoard is the goal of the quest in Below. Unusually for this trope the dragon is long dead, having been dispatched decades ago by a wizard who claimed the treasure for himself. Now that the wizard himself has passed on, his fortune sits in the underground ruins where he found it, making it prohibitively dangerous to reach.

In Isekai Shokudou, the Red Queen is a dragon whose hoard happens to include a magical portal leading to a restaurant in Japan. Therefore, she considers the restaurant one of her treasures and she is very protective of the restaurant and its staff.

The Gotrek & Felix novel Dragonslayer has several Slayers on a quest to slay an ancient dragon who'd dented their airship. Its hoard is, at worst, a close secondary motivation for the Dwarves. The hoard is lost when accidentally ignited gunpowder triggers a cave-in, but that is only a temporary setback for a race of miners.

Live Action TV

Played with in the Doctor Who serial "Dragonfire" which has Mel and the Doctor go hunting for a rumored treasure that supposedly is guarded by a dragon below the surface of the ice planet Svartos. The reality turns out somewhat different.

Supernatural. The Winchesters find themselves up against dragons in "Like a Virgin", albeit of a human-shapeshifting variety. As well as kidnapping virgins for their Evil Plan, the dragons also steal any gold on their persons. Dean finds a small pile of gold jewelry in their lair, and gleefully helps himself.

In an episode of Grimm, two Dämonfeuer (dragon-like Wesen) collect vast quantities of copper for their homes: one in an abandoned mine, one in an actual house. The electrical conductivity of the copper is suggested to tie in with their fire-breathing abilities.

Magazines

One issue of Dragon had for its cover a picture of a dragon's hoard, which contained gold, jewels, and many, many less conventional objects, like a kitchen sink.

A Knights of the Dinner Table strip in Dragon had Weird Pete run a game where the PCs went up against a Thwack-Iron Dragon only to discover it had invested its hoard.

Mythology

Dragons of Classical Mythology frequently guard something (usually on command of a god), but there is a broad range of objects guarded. It helps that dragons are often said to never sleep, making them ideal guardians. There are at least two prominent instances of dragons guarding golden MacGuffins:

The dragon Ladon was set by Hera to guard the Golden Apples that grow in the Garden of the Hesperides.

King Aeëtes of Colchis employed a large serpentine dragon to guard the Golden Fleece sought by Jason and the Argonauts.

In Rome, there was a folk belief that dragons guard buried treasure as a natural instinct, and dragons therefore are referenced as epitomes of avarice:

Invoked in Cicero's 13th Philippic Speech (delivered March 43 B.C.), when Cicero says about a henchman of Marc Antony who had appropriated part of Pompey's property that he "clutches the patrimony [of Pompey] like a dragon clutches treasure". The word Cicero uses ("circumplexus") implies that he imagines the dragon literally coiling around his treasure.

When describing a painting that showed a dragon, the Greek writer Philostratus (3rd century AD) claims that dragons are "devoted to gold", and because of this instinct may guard "treasure that lies hidden under the earth".

Chinese Mythology: The fucanglong or "hidden treasure dragon" lives underground, guarding both man-made treasure as well as natural deposits of precious stone or metal. They are also held responsible for volcanism.

In native Anglo-Saxon belief, dragons are always hoard-guardians. Interestingly, they often nest in barrows, i.e. burial-mounds, rather than in natural caves:

The dragon in Beowulf is attracted by gold and makes his home on a treasure hidden in a barrow—because that is how dragons roll. When a runaway slave steals a single goblet from the sleeping dragon's hoard, the dragon upon waking notices the theft and is so furious he breaks forth to devastate Geatland in revenge. In the earlier part of the poem, there is also a reference to another dragon hoard won by the dragonslayer Sigemund [sic] by killing a dragon in a cave.

The gnomic poem Maxims II contains the line: "a dragon must be in a barrow, oldnote or, depending on the translation, "wise" and proud of treasure"

"Dragon's bed" (dreka beðr) appears as a "kenning" (poetical paraphrase) meaning "gold" in Old Norse poetry, which Snorri Sturluson in Prose Edda explains as a reference to the myth of Fafnir. Other kennings quoted by Snorri are "lair of Fafnir", "Grafvitnir's pillow" and similar expressions (like Fafnir, Grafvitnir is a mythological dragon).

In the Saga Of Ragnar Lothbrok, princess Thora raises a tiny little baby dragon by letting it breed on a gold coin. The dragon grows to an alarming size, in the process hatching a massive pile of gold. One of the rare instances when a Hoarding Dragon is combined with a "save the princess" plot.

Book 2 of Gesta Danorum relates how young King Frode, looking desperately for money to pay his troops, hears about a giant venom-breathing snake that occupies a hill-like island on which much treasure is buried. Frode goes there, kills the dragon, digs up the treasure and thus regains his solvency.

A rather similar tale is told in book 6 of the same book about King Fridleif, who on a sea-journey is driven to an unknown island where a treasure is hidden in an underground chamber, guarded by a sea-dragon (who is then killed by Fridleif).

In East and South Slavic, especially Russian Mythology, dragons (zmeys) are shapeshifting creatures that can alternate between a reptilian and a human(oid) form. Accordingly they will not lie on hoards in a cave, but have palaces in far-away lands where they frequently own great riches. When zmeys demand tribute from humans, they will either demand maidens, or gold.

According to an Icelandic folk legend (published by Jón Árnason in Icelandic Folktales and Fairy Tales, 1862), the Lagarfljót Worm, a lake monster that supposedly inhabits Lake Lagarfljót in East Iceland, came into being when a girl put a "heath-snake" (lýngorm) in a box with a gold ring under it, because she had been told this would make the gold multiply. It worked, but the size of the creature increased together with the treasure. The girl freaked out and threw the box with the snake and the gold into the lake. The creature is still in it, grown to an enormous size and guarding an equally huge heap of gold at the lake bottom.

Pinball

Dungeons & Dragons has the adventurers going up against a fire-breathing dragon and its hoard of gold coins.

Similarly, the "Dragon's Keep" table of Full Tilt! Pinball requires the player to steal the dragon's treasure hoard.

Radio

In The BBC's Tolkien parody Hordes of the Things we are told that blue dragons hoard "those woolen foot-garments that men do call socks, stealing one only of every pair". So now you know where they went.

All dragons have hoards, typically three times as much treasure as other monsters of an equivalent power level. Beyond the sheer avaricious pleasure derived from wallowing in their coins like a pig, keeping a mental tabulation of their hoard's current worth, or maintaining an inventory down to the last copper piece, the Draconomicon sourcebook explains that a dragon's hoard allows it to control the circumstances of its eventual demise. Rather than suddenly succumbing to the weight of centuries in its twilight years, a dragon may consume its hoard and choose to depart the earthly realm peacefully, merge with the physical world and become a guardian spirit of one of its kind's nesting sites, or take up the Dragon Ascendant Prestige Class and begin their first steps on the road to becoming divinity. Dragons also derive status from the size of their hoards, and bored wyrms may take up the (ludicrously complex) game of xorvintaal and compete for each others' treasure with the help of mortal "chess pieces."

The Draconomicon also provides examples of atypical dragon hoards. One eccentric bronze dragon maintains a collection of interesting driftwood and seashells from near her coastal home, a golden great wyrm has amassed an enormous library of rare books ("you can't learn anything from gold"), an unfortunate white dragon's hoard is held hostage by the tribe of ice giants enslaving him, while an enterprising blue dragon's greatest treasure is the salt mine he took over.

Even dragons with more traditional hoards may provide unique challenges. The sand dragons introduced in the Sandstorm supplement keep their treasures buried beneath the desert — hope your party packed a shovel alongside that 11-foot pole.

If a dragon is slain and its hoard looted, it may linger as a ghostly dragon, haunting the mortal plane until its stolen property (or treasure of an equivalent value) is returned to its sacked lair, after which it settles upon the loot one last time and disappears along with it. Yes, dragons love gold so much that they can take it with them.

When they know they are dying of natural causes, one of the first things a Dragon does before heading off to the Dragon graveyard is to devour its hoard.

The collective wealth and possessions of the dragon Dunkelzahn basically constitutes a hoard, and his comments indicate that dragons in general tend to accumulate them, whether they want to or not (it's described as a matter of collecting representations of their long memories and pasts). Dunkelzahn makes the idiosyncratic (and, among his fellows, controversial) decision to compose a will dividing and bequeathing his hoard in the event of his death (a large portion of which goes into funding an entire foundation dedicated solely to the execution of the will).

Lofwyr's hoard consists largely of Mega Corp. stock certificates, and as CEO and sole owner of Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries he's the richest known entity on earth.

In the board game Dungeon Quest (original title: "Drakborgen"), the goal is to reach a dragon's hoard and steal as much as possible from it. But if you steal so much that you wake up the dragon, you die.

The trope is a game mechanic in Beast: The Primordial, which centers around monsters. Each monster has an Urge which they must fulfil (or risk going insane from). Several NPCs in the corebook have an Urge to hoard items, the type of which varies between characters (weapons, art, and — yes — jewels). In fact, many monsters (usually of the Ugallu or Anakim families) are explicitly draconic in appearance.

Theater

In Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung tetralogy (as adapted, with liberties, from Norse Mythology), the giant Fafner kills his hitherto-bro Fasolt for a hoard of gold (The Rhine-Gold) and is later found transformed into a dragon lying on the gold (The Valkyrie), until he is killed by Siegfried (Siegfried).

In the first game, there were three dragons. All of them had hoards, which you could try to loot (unwise, as the dragons typically noticed right away), or you could do a favor for each dragon and gain a reward.

In RuneScape, many dragon lairs are littered with piles of gold. The extremely rare runite rocks are also usually found near dragons, because it is a delicacy to them.

In the game Blazing Dragons all the dragons eat gems which annoys the evil King George no end. However they're not fixated on them living lives just like a normal person.

The knight in The Cave has to fetch the gold from the dragon and give it to the princess in order to get her amulet to give to the king to pull the sword from the stone. Things don't go quite as planned...

While dragons in Skyrim are not lounging on a bed of Septims, there is usually a well-stocked treasure chest coincidentally sitting near a dragon roost. Also, Paarthurnax claims that the Dragonborn got a few draconic instincts with their dragon soul, including hoarding, hence the Kleptomaniac Hero tendencies.

In the series' spin-off Action-Adventure game Redguard, this is Subverted by the dragon Nafaalilargus (a.k.a. Nahfahlaar). He was assigned to guard the treasury beneath the palace of Stros M'Kai, but it was an Imperial treasure hoard, not his own.

In Discworld, Rincewind discovers a dragon's hoard. His joy for becoming a rich man is shortlived.

In Ancient Domains of Mystery, there's an underwater one guarded by a female water dragon. Trying to pick up an item there will make her warn you, and ignoring her will result in her trying to kill you.

The Red Dragon in Dragon's Crown is found in a room filled with all sorts of treasure. Said treasure room is very cramped, making fighting the dragon difficult.

In Dragon's Lair, the player's mission is to battle a dragon which also owns a hoard in a treasure room.

In Quest for Yrolg, you play as the imp servant of the evil necromancer Yrolg who has a dragon guarding his treasure room.

Dragon Age: Origins has a few dragons (most of them optional bosses) that have a lot of treasure to be plundered afterwards. Some of them are actually called "Dragon Hoard".

The dragon type Pokémon Gabite is noted in some of its Pokedex entries as habitually collecting jewels and storing them in its lair, though as with almost every entry, it's an Informed Attribute that's never actually seen in action.

Dragons in Dwarf Fortresstry to collect as much loot as possible during world generation, but in practice they only ended up with a handful of moderately valuable baubles. Everything in their lair will be worth less than random gear you get off one squad of bandits and isn't worth a tenth as much as the dragon itself, which drops up to 25 tonnes of flesh on death, all of which is worth 15 times as much as a normal animal's.

In Heroes of Might and MagicIII, the Dungeon Town's strongest units are Dragons. Their creature dwelling, the Dragon Cave, is a typical dragon hoard full of gold (appropriately enough, this is one of the more expensive level 7 unit buildings). Upgrading the Dragon Cave, thus upgrading Red Dragons to the stronger Black Dragons, adds more gold to the hoard.

In Gems of War, the dragon Emperina has lost one of these to dwarves. The player is recruited to help recover it (which isn't the side of the equation that protagonists are usually on).

This is the premise of Hoard: As a dragon, you have to amass the largest pile of gold you can get your claws on by kidnapping princesses, terrorizing villages, slaying knights and thieves, and occasionally stealing treasure from other dragons.

The Young Dragon demands a toll from the Daughter because he wants to start hoarding enough riches for when he's old.

The Old Dragon is first seen sitting next to his massive hoard... then he subverts it by claiming that he doesn't collect any riches any longer, since he's centuries old already and doesn't need anyrthing. He'll even give the Daughter some money and a gift if she keeps visiting him!

Visual Novels

In Sword Daughter, the treasure hoard of a legendary dragon provides motivation for several of the story's possible villains.

Web Original

SCP Foundation: SCP-1779 are tiny reptiles which feed only on coins and make their nests out of them. They can grow to really big sizes, though...

In the French parodic literature series Kalon Le Barbare, it is stated that only male dragons build hoards, to attract females. It's only revealed after the "heroes" spent a whole chapter fighting a dragon that turned out to be female, and thus had no hoard of her own, much to their disappointment.

It's explained in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic that dragons are greedy by nature and will hoard things as an instinctive behavior. They also eat gems, which implies the heaps of jewels they keep around are actually their pantries. Specific episodes with dragon hoards:

In "Dragonshy", the mane six are sent on a diplomatic mission to a dragon who's taken up residence near Ponyville. Rarity speaks to the dragon and appeals his ego, a strategy that appears to work — until the dragon realizes she's helping herself to his treasure hoard, and he kicks her out.

"Owl's Well That Ends Well" features another full-grown dragon (whose hoard, interestingly enough, consists of gems and only gems, with no metal to be seen) who gets angry at and attacks the baby dragon Spike for stealing gems from his hoard.

In "Secret of My Excess", it's revealed that hoarding behavior can cause dragons to undergo rapid growth, as a dragon's size increases with the size of its hoard. In the case of Spike, this leads to a nasty feedback loop, as this growth also decreases their mental faculties and makes them hoard more.

In "Dragon Quest", adolescent dragons are shown playing "King of the Hoard", a game which consists of dragons fighting one another over a pile of treasure.

Smothering Smokebreaths make their nests by gathering as much metal as possible and then melting it together. This frequently includes precious metal, although they seem to choose based more on shininess than anything else.

Armorwings gather any metal they can find and fuse it to their bodies to protect themselves. They hoard a supply in case they need to replace lost pieces.

The Sandbuster is a straighter example. In addition to grabbing people who enter its territory, it has amassed a large collection of treasure in its cave.

Real Life (maybe)

The English chronicler Thomas of Walsingham recorded an event that supposedly took place in 1344 on the Welsh border in Herefordshire: A "Saracen doctor" captured a "serpent" with a spell and before he left mentioned that the serpent had a cave full of treasure. Some locals from Hereford set out to dig up the cave and salvage the unguarded hoard. "So they gathered together there for several nights, until the Earl's retainers got wind of the matter; then the Hereford men were arrested and committed to prison. The Earl acquired a considerable treasure from this business." It stands to reason the diggers had found a real treasure (or possibly a tomb with grave goods), and the "serpent" was attached to the story because it seemed logical.

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